John Diebold, a visionary thinker whose early and persistent promotion of computers and other far-reaching innovations helped shape industrial development in America and beyond, died Monday at his home in Bedford Hills, N.Y. He was 79.
Mr. Diebold, who held degrees in business and engineering, was an evangelist of the future. In 1952, when computers weighed 5 tons, his book “Automation” described how programmable devices could change the day-to-day operations of all kinds of businesses. Even the book’s title was novel: It introduced the modern-day meaning of a term that had previously applied only to the mechanical handling of automobile parts at Ford Motor Co.
Mr. Diebold made a career of recognizing relevant advances in technology and explaining them to the likes of AT&T, Boeing, Xerox and IBM.
In 1961 he and his firm, the Diebold Group, designed an electronic network to link account records at the Bowery Savings Bank in New York. The records immediately reflected both deposits and withdrawals and were available to any teller.
Soon other New York banks hired the Diebold Group to help them install such systems, which cost more than keeping paper records but quickly became vital for modern banking.
Many of his proposals seemed to lead nowhere, but they often planted ideas that came to fruition years later. In 1968, 10 years before interstate ATM networks, he advised several Chase Manhattan Bank executives of the costs and benefits of a national system for electronic funds transfer. His audience included Paul Volcker, the future Federal Reserve chairman.
Mr. Diebold came to believe that computers and other information technologies could reshape society, and he guided municipalities and countries in using them to manage the budget, compile data and streamline public services like fire protection and distribution of welfare.
He also started John Diebold Inc., an investment firm, in 1967. It financed such ventures as a computer-leasing company and a well-known manufacturer of polling machines.
